Motivational Analysis

Although there was hardly any mention of analytics (whereas in the previous conference there was hardly any useful mentions), I found a talk by Red Brick Media’s Micah Fisher-Kirshner very interesting. His talk was on motivational analysis and is one of those areas where analytics and conversion design work hand in hand.

I may be butchering his ideas/theories, but the following is my take on what he meant…

Motivational analysis involves looking at the motivation of your visitors, and then adjusting your website to try and better address their desires.

How do you know your customers motivation? Well what they type into the search box is basically them telling you what they are after! While this might sometimes be quite a short query, research shows that queries are getting longer – and therefore searchers are telling us more and more specifically what they are after.

By cutting your search visitor data by the term they arrived on, you can see how well your site meets your users motivations.

E.g. if you get a big bounce rate for customers whose search included the term ‘cheap’, then maybe your prices are scarily highIf you get lots of queries with location requests (e.g. law firm manchester) who don’t then find your store locator on site, maybe you need to make that page more visible

This is such an interesting area, and there is way too much to talk about in a short blog post, however in future blogs I will give more examples of how you can use this kind of analysis, and you can also visit Micah’s blog